a VAST wonderland (Feb, 1929)

This seems appropriate. I’ll be in San Diego (well, actually Carlsbad) from tomorrow morning until Sunday. So I probably won’t have any new posts until next week

a VAST wonderland

IF you start vacation planning now and send for the new All-Year Club book, your eagerness to be right out here in Southern California will admit of delay no later than early this summer. This book of 73 large photographs, beautifully done in rotogravure, so faithfully tells the Southern California story that only a vacation here will answer the longing.
Nowhere else in the world are combined so many fascinating nature-created sights. The High Sierra are but one thrill of many, for a few miles off the near-by shore islands rise from the blue Pacific like Capri itself! For 270 miles, the Southern California coast line, now rugged, now marked by broad, safe beaches, is a Riviera in your own America! Vast orange orchards laden with ripening golden fruit; Old Spanish Missions; the Big Trees, near-by mile-high mountains … all await your vacation visit this summer.

Summer days are rainless; thunder and lightning are practically unknown. Air is dry and free from humidity. Nights are cool. Blankets are a sleeping-comfort necessity . . . not one night in ten, but ten nights out of eleven . . . and all summer!

Night life in Los Angeles and Hollywood is unending in its pleasures. Gay hotels, cafes; great theaters; “Symphonies under the Stars” in Hollywood Bowl. Los Angeles County’s oil industry alone is rated at a billion dollars. Agricultural products annually approximate $95,000,000. Plan to come directly to Los Angeles, then see the whole Pacific coast … at small increased cost.

Wow. Some of the most stilted advertising copy I’ve read. “your eagerness … will admit of delay”? “Blankets are a sleeping-comfort necessity”? Seriously?

Tracy B says: December 8, 20093:38 pm

That was back in the era where gay meant gay and not “gay.”

The advertisement is quite accurate about the use of blankets in the summertime. I would add that the furnace does not get turned on (at least not in So. Cal) until almost Thanksgiving.

Also real estate was dirt cheap in those day– not like it is today.

Don says: December 8, 20094:07 pm

And gay hotels — California always was ahead of everyone else . . . .

Rick Auricchio says: December 8, 20094:59 pm

Carlsbad…they should never hav sent those famous caverns to New Mexico.

nlpnt says: December 8, 20099:23 pm

Are they selling books, or vacations? Or are they trying to get people to move there?

Firebrand38 says: December 8, 20099:44 pm

None of the above. It was the All Year Club trying to get people to vacation there. Something about the line “If you start vacation planning now” that kind of gave it away.

slim says: December 9, 20091:16 pm

It’s a little ironic that this ad ran in early 1929. During the depression a lot of people came to California, my folks included.

Tracy B says: December 9, 20093:33 pm

Well my family was in California during the Horse and Buggy days. Instead of taking a car to the coast in the summertime for vacation, it was a team of horses and a wagon. Fresno to Avila Beach and back.

What an awesome image. I live in the San Fernando Valley, and I am always blown away by old pictures from the region. Heck, it wasn’t all that long ago that there were only orange groves where all the strip malls now sit! It just really reminds me of why Southern California is so great — there’s still that “frontier spirit” alive and well wherever you go.

I would love to hear from older individuals who have been in California since those heady days…